I’ve got my copy of Michael Grunwald’s new book on the making of stimulus, The New New Deal, and there are a lot of juicy nuggets in it. In particular, it may shed new light on the degree to which Republicans may have decided to deny Obama all cooperation for the explicit purpose of rendering his presidency a failure — making it easier for them to mount a political comback after their disastrous 2008 losses.

Grunwald has Joe Biden on the record making a striking charge. Biden says that during the transition, a number of Republican Senators privately confided to him that Mitch McConnell had given them the directive that there was to be no cooperation with the new administration — because he had decided that “we can’t let you succeed.”

Here’s the relevant passage, from page 207:

Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ he recalls. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden says.

The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

-snip-

Full article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/biden-mcconnell-decided-to-withhold-all-cooperation-even-before-we-took-office/2012/08/10/64e9a138-e302-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_blog.html